Suzy McKee Charnas – Treehouse Writers

We regularly see whining about why the world imagined by science fiction writers of the so-called Golden Age (i.e., mostly the 1950s) hasn’t come to pass. Where are the flying cars and jet packs? Why don’t we have settlements on the Moon?

And then, of course, we get all the hype around LLMs, as if it is going to become the artificial intelligence we were promised. (Pro tip: it’s not.)

The problem is, I think, that people have focused too much on the wrong science fiction, the technocentric and technophilic stuff that is convinced that computer tech is going to save the world.

Right now, the science fiction writer whose visions are closest to reality is Octavia Butler, particularly the world she wrote about in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. While that world is certainly not as much fun to contemplate as living on the Moon, it does have a great deal to recommend it in terms of how things might happen.

I’m fairly sure she meant it as a warning (or perhaps saw it all too clearly); certainly nobody except a few of the grifters currently in power wanted to see it.

Recently the creepy guy who leads the Groypers (and no, I don’t know what that means nor do I want to know) got on a podcast and said that all women – and that includes white ones and maybe even the Kristi Noems and Pam Bondis – should be rounded up and put into gulags, with the ones who would be good breeders (I assume he means the white ones, since he’s an extreme racist as well as misogynist) moved to a birthing gulag.

And that got me to thinking about another science fiction writer: Suzy McKee Charnas.

I mean, you’d almost think he’d read her four-book series, The Holdfast Chronicles, which takes place in a world that does just that with women and includes the racism as well.

I haven’t read those books in a long time, but I’ve just started to re-read them now because they are, in fact, relevant. In fact, I suspect they are even more relevant than The Handmaid’s Tale. Though I hope they aren’t quite as close to reality as Parable of the Sower.

I’m currently reading the first book, Walk to the End of the World, and I have to say that the male world she depicts is the kind of toxic masculinity on steroids that such men seem to want. I recall thinking it was too extreme when I first read it, but given current events, I’m no longer sure about that.

I wish Suzy was still with us to discuss that point. Continue reading “Misogyny on Steroids”…

I was reading a feature piece in The New York Times by a man in his 40s who was out getting ice cream with his aunt — something they’d done regularly when he was much younger.

He described his aunt thusly: “Her brown hair had gone mostly gray, but she had every bit of the energy and snappy wit I remembered.”

It annoyed me. My reaction was, “Well, why wouldn’t she?” I mean, gray hair doesn’t mean someone’s not still the same person they always were.

It’s the same kind of attitude that causes reporters to write stories about “grandmothers” doing something that is supposedly unusual for someone their age, such as defending themselves from a mugger.

I know a lot of grandmothers with black belts. Just saying.

I also pick it up in well-meaning statements about “looking after our elders.” In many cases, those elders are doing a great job of looking after the community.

It’s the assumption that an old person who still has “energy and snappy wit” is unusual that gets me. Or, for that matter, the assumption that someone walking with a cane or a walker is no longer the person they used to be.

As I was writing this piece, I saw on social media that Suzy McKee Charnas had died. One person described her reaction to this as “gutted” and that summed up mine as well. Continue reading “Thinking About Aging and Loss”…